


My Goddess

by silver_fish



Series: bad things happen bingo [2]
Category: Tales of Symphonia
Genre: Angst, Hurt No Comfort, Kharlan War, Multi, Non-Linear Narrative, Retrospective, Unhappy Ending, Unhealthy Idealization, pre-game
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-19
Updated: 2020-02-19
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:20:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22725310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silver_fish/pseuds/silver_fish
Summary: When Martel dies, Yuan finally understands: they were not meant for love.
Relationships: Kratos Aurion/Yuan Ka-Fai, Kratos Aurion/Yuan Ka-Fair/Martel Yggdrasill
Series: bad things happen bingo [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1634152
Comments: 7
Kudos: 9
Collections: Bad Things Happen Bingo





	My Goddess

**Author's Note:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/laphicets) / [tumblr](https://kohakhearts.tumblr.com)
> 
> never written these three before really but i love the kharlan heroes group and i'm so glad to have had the opportunity to explore their dynamics! not gonna lie i have no idea how these characters actually are (perhaps im due for a replay, esp for kratos's route LOL) so i hope i didn't _totally_ butcher their characterizations. this was a prompt fill from my bad things happen bingo card; request was "if i can't have you" with yuan/kratos/martel. hope you enjoy!

In the beginning they are not four. There are Mithos and Martel, always meant to be a duo, brother and admired sister, hero and healer. They could have done this on their own, perhaps, but they didn’t. In the beginning, they are not four. Not technically. Rather, they are two groups of one, another group of two.

But Yuan thinks that the beginning of his life and the day he was born probably aren’t the same. Rather, he thinks life _really_ began when he met Martel. She could light up entire rooms with her presence, angelic, _godly_. She loved everyone, good or bad or somewhere in between. She saw things within him that even on his best days he has never been able to see for himself. She gave a piece of her heart to every single thing she did, and they all loved her for it.

So, in the beginning, they were not four, technically. Except that, eventually, they were. And for Yuan, that is the moment the story starts.

Kratos was different from them, human. Mithos, bright-eyed, brilliant, a young hero in the making, looked up to him anyway. He didn’t hold the same blood in his veins as they did, but that was all right; he was talented, and he made Mithos feel special. Martel saw things in him too, things Yuan has never seen even on his best days. They were all young idealists, caught up in a war that started from where they stood and expanded outward. It began with them—half-elves, people like Mithos and Martel and Yuan—and it would end with them, too, the end of the beginning or the beginning of the next end, something like that.

Martel used to say that life was not measured in minutes, or in breaths, but in experiences. “Every experience we’ve shared together,” she said, “is one I’m glad to have had.”

Yuan agreed with her, then. He saw the world in her eyes, in her hands, in her smile. He thinks Kratos did too, though of course he was there for Mithos too. His advisor, his trainer, his guardian in all the ways Martel could not be. They had all been alone for a long time. Here, now, at the beginning, they were four.

The story really begins with the war, but Yuan doesn’t like to think much of that. If his moments with Martel and Kratos and Mithos were the best, then every moment of the war separate from them were the worst. Rather, the war functioned to take their happiness away, to snatch those good moments up and crush them beneath its oppressive weight. None of them really knew what would come, only that it would. They had to keep running towards it, even though they dreaded it, even though they didn’t necessarily think it should be their burden to carry, not when it sat atop the entire world.

In the beginning, there had also been a world. Just one. Yuan thinks that this might be symbolic, maybe. Martel would say so, at least. He still longs to hear her opinion on all of it, on everything that happened after the end, after their new beginning.

If life is, as Martel said, measured in moments, then he supposes that the end of that first beginning was actually a rebirth. That, since every moment after it was a moment without Martel in it, it could not have been a part of the same life that had begun with her, like spring beneath her fingertips. She gave them growth, and in her absence she has only brought pain.

He remembers many long nights, where the three of them would be sitting up later while Mithos slumbered on, the youngest of them and consequently the quickest to tire. Martel loved stars, so she would point out constellations with them and explain their stories. The ones she wasn’t sure about, she just made up, but they still felt important.

“You could be a storyteller,” he told her, once.

Her eyes were bright. “You think so? I used to tell stories to Mithos, but he says he’s too old now.”

“We’re not too old,” Yuan said, gesturing between Kratos and himself.

Back then, Kratos smiled a lot more, and he smiled at this moment. “You can’t be too old for stories,” he said quietly. “They always have new lessons to teach us.”

Martel beamed. “Well, I hope mine are good lessons, then. Look, that one—it looks like a rabbit? So, a long time ago…”

She had a mystical sort of quality to her, one that made her so very easy to love. Her voice was always soft, and she rarely frowned, at least not in the beginning. Maybe, as the years pressed on, she became less positive, more worn down. Yuan suspects they all did. It is a symptom of war, after all; by now, he doubts he has any positivity left inside of him. It is why he stayed with Mithos for so long, even after it became clear that he was doing exactly all the things he promised he never would. He thinks it was the same for Kratos, but Kratos and Yuan have always been very different people. Martel liked that about them, though. She said that they both brought out the best in each other.

“I could spend the rest of my life with you,” she would say, sometimes. “Just the four of us, always together. Doesn’t it sound nice?”

It _did_ sound nice. It still does, to some degree.

He remembers their time together at camps the best. While their fights were dynamic and exciting, and their journey to make pacts with the Summon Spirits a never-ending road of invigorating trials and challenges, it was always after the battle had been fought that Yuan really got the sense that home is not really place, but people. In his case, the three of them. If he could preserve these moments forever, he would. But he has watched Mithos try, for centuries now, and the self-depreciating desperation of it is far from a glamorous thing.

Yuan doesn’t really know what happened to Kratos in those years he was gone. He does, in some sense. He knows that he started his own family, his own new beginning, but he doesn’t know _what_ all that really meant. All he knows is that, from the first time he saw Kratos after Anna’s and Lloyd’s deaths, he could see that the old Kratos, if any part of hm had even existed—the same Kratos who would point out constellations so Martel could tell them another story, this one maybe even true—was now gone.

They were not four in the beginning, not technically. But they were. Now, they are barely even individuals. All of them died, at least a little bit, with Martel.

+

Time does not pass the same for immortals, even as it does for half-elves. He wonders if Martel would have enjoyed her immortality, had she gotten to live it. But, of course, she is even more immortal now than they are, a deity, a goddess, the people’s last and only hope.

Back when she was simply a person, though, a half-elf barely into her adulthood, she always said that it would be nice to have something to believe in. “Someone,” she would say, “or something. To guide us. So we know this is really the right thing to do.”

The goddess Martel guides them now. Yuan still does not know if any of them are doing the right thing.

+

“It’s just a little tomato,” Martel said, laughing at the look on Kratos’s face. “Really, you can hardly even taste it. Right, Mithos?”

“Right,” Mithos agreed. “Martel is a great cook, after all. Everything she makes tastes good, no matter what’s in it.”

Martel smiled widely.

“I have nothing against tomatoes,” Kratos denied. “I’m sure it’s very good, Martel.”

“You would know,” she said teasingly, “if you just tried it.”

Kratos blanched. They all laughed.

“Next time I’ll remember,” Martel promised. She always said this, though, and she always forgot. She really liked tomatoes. She couldn’t understand why anybody else wouldn’t.

And, for her sake, Kratos always did wind up eating them anyway. Because he loved her more than he hates tomatoes, Yuan supposes.

After she died, he never did eat a tomato again.

+

Kratos stays with Mithos for a long time, longer than Yuan does, anyway. There is a part of Yuan that, even now, would be happy to see Martel revived too. But if they could bring her back, then it really ought to be in a world she would have liked. He tries to explain this to Kratos, and at first it seems to have some sort of effect. He leaves, runs off, falls in love all over again. And then it all falls away from him, again, and he is left with the only person who keeps taking him back, who will always forgive him even when he does not deserve it.

Mithos is unhinged. He is just a child, but he has been a child for four thousand years now. Yuan made excuses for him, once. But Mithos and Martel did not save him the way they saved Kratos, he thinks. Or perhaps they are just simply different people, unable to reach the same conclusions even when put in the exact same position.

It isn’t the same for them, though. On the surface, but not beyond. Because the truth is that Mithos will forgive Kratos for anything, but he never did forgive Yuan for not saving Martel. He knows, because he cannot forgive himself either.

They are no longer four, so Yuan begins to carve his own path. He founds the organization in opposition of Cruxis, the Renegades. He meets Botta, relies on him, but never does he make the same mistake twice, that terrible mistake of getting too attached to any of it, of loving too much. Much of the structure of the worlds now is his fault. After all, he never did tell Mithos “ _No_.”

He becomes aware of everything around him, in a way he hadn’t been before. He looks for those things Martel saw in all of them, and then he decides whether or not those things are even worth seeing or not (he decides they’re not; she saw too much good in the world, and now she is dead).

Colette Brunel is the change, until she isn’t.

Yuan never really did know what to think about Kratos’s little family. He had, in one sense, been rather betrayed, Martel’s words echoing in his mind— _just the four of us_ —but Kratos must know as well as Yuan does that they will never go back to that. It is a wish, sometimes, a dream, but never a possibility.

Just over a decade ago, Yuan tried to kill Kratos, to release the seal of Origin and get his hands on the Eternal Sword. But if Kratos found life after Martel in Anna Irving, he lost it again as soon as she died. Maybe, for Kratos, that was the moment he understood it, but Yuan has known for millennia. There is no goddess. No mystical deity to conspire against them.

But if Martel really _were_ a goddess, he wonders if this would have been a part of her machinations. _Just the four of us_ , she said.

Just the four of us.

If she can’t have them, then who can?

+

“When the war is over,” Martel said, “we’ll still be together. Won’t we?”

“Yes,” Yuan said immediately. He would never have considered it any other way, even without the engagement ring around his finger.

“Always,” was Kratos’s agreement.

If only they had known how very long “always” really is.

+

“Together or not at all,” Mithos would say. He meant Martel and himself, of course. Kratos and Yuan were always secondary. Or, perhaps Kratos was secondary, and Yuan was below him even still.

“Together or not at all,” he would say, as if he could not live unless Martel lived as well. When she smiled and agreed, Yuan knew the same could be said for her, about all of them.

“Together or not at all,” he says, and he is only thinking about Martel.

+

Lloyd Irving is not like Mithos, but Yuan suspects that Kratos would like him to be. Perhaps he saw Anna like this: angelic, _godly_.

Or perhaps he didn’t. Yuan will never ask, because he doesn’t want to know. He thinks that, if Kratos admitted to seeing Anna any other way, Yuan would not accept it. He also thinks that Kratos knows this, and so this is why he doesn’t ever talk about Anna. He only talks about Lloyd, who is still alive, like Mithos.

Lloyd, who is not Mithos, but could be. And for a while, Yuan thinks Kratos really will choose Mithos over Lloyd, the broken remains of a hero over the reincarnation of him.

After all, all loves are greater once they have already died.

+

In the beginning, they are not four. Perhaps they never really were, but Yuan would like to hope, sometimes, so he clings to this. In the beginning, they are not four, but they became four, until one beginning ended and erupted into the next.

In the beginning, they are not four. They will never be four again, and yet it is Martel’s voice that sits in Yuan’s subconscious, a consistent reminder, words he cannot remember whether she really spoke or not: _I did everything for you._

And so she did.

+

They never called the thing “love.” They never really called it at all, actually. It was meant to be felt, not heard. Seen, but never spoken. It was no great secret, however; Mithos often looked at Yuan in such a way that Yuan is sure he hoped would make him vanish, as if Yuan could ever contend with Mithos for Martel’s affection anyway. It wasn’t just Yuan, though, and he sometimes wonders if Mithos knew about Kratos, knew about those smiles he reserved only for Martel. He must not have, because he never seemed to detest Kratos, not the way he detested Yuan.

There was never a moment where they were completely alone. Oh, certainly, sometimes they would stop somewhere and two of them would depart while the other stayed, but they tended to stick together in one group, never quite sure where the next threat might come from, whether they should be more afraid of the Sylvarantis or the Tethe’allians. They never did stop to question whether or not those who swore their trust to them were really trustworthy. They were all young, though Yuan often thinks he should have known better. He knows, somewhere deep inside him, if he had not let himself lower his guard so much, he could have saved Martel. But she would not have loved the guarded version of him. She said so often, or at least he thinks she did. Four thousand years is a very long time, though.

There is nowhere in either world left where one will not see Martel. Not as Yuan tries to fix her in his memory, but just in her existence. He does not think that there is better figure to ascend to godhood. In life, Martel was not universally loved, though she desperately wished that could be the case. Now, though, she is the one they all look askance to, _Oh dear goddess, please hear my prayer…_

Of course it is a phony religion, a simple construction by Mithos to bring order to his authoritarian dystopia. Still, sometimes, when there is nobody else around to witness, Yuan finds himself praying:

_My goddess, how did you get so far away? I keep reaching for you, but I never find you. You are everywhere. You are nowhere._

_My goddess, I love you._

_My goddess, he loved you too._

_My goddess, why can’t you love us back?_

There is no reason. There is never an answer.

But the scriptures assure him that the goddess loves them all, in equal measure. He knows that it’s true. It does not make him wish any less that she could love him just a little more.

+

“I can’t breathe,” Martel gasped.

Kratos was by her side in an instant, allowing her to lean into him for support.

“Let’s stay here for the night,” Yuan suggested. “You’re still recovering. You can only push your body so far.”

Kratos nodded in agreement. Mithos stayed quiet, caught somewhere between pained and angry. He never got upset with Martel, but sometimes he did get close. Especially after she grew sick from the Cruxis Crystal. He didn’t know it, but he was not really angry with Martel at all; rather, he was upset with himself, and neither Kratos nor Yuan could give him a reason not to be.

He’s only fourteen, though. He is just a child. He has always been a child, even when he is not.

“I’m sorry,” Martel said quietly, a bit later, once they had secured the area and set up camp. The words met all their ears, but they were really only meant for Mithos. Mithos, the hero. Mithos, her brother. Mithos, who would one day commit thousands of years of genocide in her name, because at some point her name was all she had become anyway.

“It’s okay,” he responded, just as quiet. “I wish you hadn’t gotten sick, Martel.”

She smiled sadly. “Me too. But it’ll get better, I’m sure. So…what should we have for dinner?”

It wasn’t until after they had eaten and Mithos had fallen asleep that Martel said, “I’m slowing him down.”

Not “us.” _Him_.

“You can’t help that,” Yuan protested. “It’s not like you asked to get sick.”

“But I should be better by now.”

“It’s only been a couple weeks. You were really sick, for a long time. You need to get your energy back, that’s all.”

Kratos sat on her other side, listening but not commenting. Yuan often got the feeling that Kratos’s silences were louder than anything he ever _did_ say. Now, he knows better; Kratos’s silences are evidence of his cowardice, something he has in spades and likely always did. A long time ago, they were enemies on a wartime battlefield. In their first new beginning, they were good friends, if not more. He isn’t sure what they are now, but he suspects this is only because Kratos is barely even a person anymore, that he has died too many times to come back for good.

“I have a bad feeling,” Martel said, her lips turning down. “That’s all.”

So rarely did she ever frown, Yuan could think of nothing better to do than reach out and grab her hand. As he did, he noted, with some surprise, that Kratos was already holding her other one.

Before them, Mithos slumbered on. There were some things, they could all agree, that he would never need to know.

+

Maybe Martel would have died of her illness anyway. Though they think she healed from it, she never did regain her strength. It is only when the same illness befalls Colette Brunel and she comes back from it as healthy and energetic as ever that Yuan stops to consider what Martel might have meant when she said she had a “bad feeling.”

She collapsed often, after the Toxicosis was gone. Though she never gave up on their mission, she frequently looked worn down, tired, ready to give up on it. But Mithos held on, and so she did too. It was not only for him, of course; Martel wanted to see the peace, and if she could have a hand in its creation, then she wanted to be there for that too. And she was. Until she wasn’t.

There is a sort of irony in it all, that Martel’s last moments were spent at the dawn of their next beginning. It was the thing she and her brother had dreamed of for so long, that they had made Kratos and Yuan dream of too. Peace, the end of the war, the beginning of a new era under the protection of the Giant Kharlan Tree.

Martel was not a victim of war, not really. She was a victim of the end of it, where everyone who did something terrible in the name of war suddenly had no more excuse, and needed to find a way to live with that—or, in many cases, to die with it. Yes, they had been too trusting. But on the dawn of that new beginning, Martel was not a victim of war. She was the victim of a cruel world, and there was simply nothing else to it.

They all were, in a way. Because they all died, at least a little bit, when Martel did. There are all these sayings about wars, about bloodshed and violence and terror. The second war, the most inevitable one, is the one which you fight with yourself. For Yuan, that was decades unto centuries spent watching Mithos spiral further and further, until the boy Martel had loved so dearly was no longer reachable.

If, indeed, Martel could see them now, he wonders if she would blame him for letting this happen to Mithos. If she would blame Kratos. More likely, she would blame herself.

But she would never blame the human who stabbed her.

+

Lloyd’s creed is simple. It’s easy to understand. He is idealistic and he is not bright, no, but he is smart and he knows what he wants. Kratos sees Mithos in him, but Yuan rather thinks he is like Martel. He does not like to see suffering. He believes that death is not an escape, but something more symptomatic of a larger issue with life. If he could cure the illness in the world, then all life would be able to flourish. It is simple to him, even though Yuan knows by now that such a thing is impossible.

Kratos is very taken with him, though, in a way he never was with Mithos. Well, Mithos was not his son, not in blood. What has Kratos learned in the past four thousand years, though? How to become lifeless within a body that still breathes?

If that is the case, then Lloyd revives him. And so it is that Yuan cannot let him die, just as he could not let him die fifteen years ago.

“You can release the seal,” is what he said then. “I know it is what you came to do.”

But Yuan grew frustrated with him, with the ease with which he was willing to throw it all away. _Always_ , that’s what he said. And maybe Martel is not here anymore, but Yuan _is_ , dammit, and maybe he loved Kratos too, because they were all separate until they were together and no matter how much he despises Kratos sometimes, he still remembers what Martel said. _We’ll still be together_.

Sometimes, Yuan misses Kratos, and then he hates himself for it, because Kratos does not feel _anything_ anymore, though maybe Lloyd is trying to teach him how. It will take time, though, and Yuan knows, has known for some time now, that Kratos is a coward. And the only thing more terrifying than living is feeling, but one can seldom do one without the other.

“I’m not going to kill you,” he said, then.

Kratos did not challenge him, though he seemed surprised.

“There’s no point,” he hissed, “if I won’t get to watch the life leave your eyes when I do.”

And that had been the end of it, then. But it was not the end, because they are here now, and the seal is broken but Yuan does not want Kratos to die, cannot possibly bear to see him meet his end as Martel did so long ago.

Kratos will detest him for it, but it doesn’t matter. Hatred is still a feeling.

+

Probably, Martel would be disappointed in them. Yuan doesn’t know what she said to Mithos when she merged with Colette. He isn’t sure if he wants to know, because knowing would shatter the illusion they have all spent thousands of years creating of her. Martel, the goddess. Perfect. Unquestionably so.

Still, he thinks she would be unhappy to see what has become of them. In the beginning, they were four.

Now, they are nothing.

They were not made for this world.

+

“I’m leaving.”

Yuan already knew that. “Yes,” he says. “That doesn’t mean you should.”

“I have to.”

“No, you don’t.”

They watch each other, for a very long time.

Finally, it is Kratos who turns away. Yuan does not bother to call after him.

He did not die. But this is much worse.

+

In the beginning, they are not four. The worlds reunited, Derris-Kharlan free of Cruxis’s clutches, eternally adrift above them. Martel’s spirit is tied to the Great Tree, but Martel herself is but a memory amongst thousands, as dead as her corpse would suggest.

Mithos got the ending he deserved, Yuan supposes. For him, death was the only salvation left. He will never be with his sister again. He is eternally, unequivocally, dead.

Kratos leaves, of course. He always does.

They were not made for this world, where wars are waged and battles are won and great loves are forged. A long time ago, they were victorious, and within minutes it was stolen away from them, bled to death on the ground while Mithos committed the worst sin of them all, the tying of bonds that would only sever when they were no longer four.

Even Botta is gone now, Yuan finds himself thinking sometimes. Like Kratos, somewhere out in the empty vastness of space, he is completely alone.

He has known, ever since Martel died:

They were not meant for love.

He will live on, always, as one. They are not—will never again be—four.

**Author's Note:**

> comments and kudos are always appreciated! xx
> 
> (p.s. catch me on twitter [@laphicets](https://twitter.com/laphicets) or tumblr [@kohakhearts](https://kohakhearts.tumblr.com) for writing updates. i also sometimes take writing requests on both!)


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